Forgot your password?
Cyhist Feb 19 1997 S
Document Actions
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 22:18:31 -0800
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Tom Van Vleck <thvv@BEST.COM>
Subject: CM> Beginnings of E-mail
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Scott Crawford asks:
>When, where, to who and how was the FIRST e-mail sent? I am interested in knowing the history of e-mail and how it came to where it is today... so feel free to expand past the initial e-mail occurence!
As Dave Anderson notes, the MIT CTSS system had electronic mail in 1965. Noel Morris and I wrote it, implementing a suggestion by Louis Pouzin and Glenda Schroeder in a CTSS Porgramming Staff Note. They wanted mail so that operators could inform you when your lost file was retrieved. Noel and I saw it as far more, and we were right.
I visited MIT on business a few summers ago, and dropped in on Roger Roach, who still had the CTSS listings. We looked at the MAD code for the MAIL command, and it was clearly my code. MAIL was a privileged command, that could do things normal user programs could not: it used the ATTACH.(PROB, PROG) call to switch to the recipient's file directory and added the message to the file MAIL BOX. We can date the command fairly precisely, since the ATTACH call was introduced as part of the "new file system" for CTSS which came up on August 9, 1965. So MAIL was added after that.
You know how the UNIX mail command works two ways, reads mail if invoked without an address, and sends if invoked with an address? My fault. The UNIX interface derives from the Multics mail command (I wrote the first one) which derives from the CTSS command. And the CTSS command worked that way because I could only have one command -- privileged commands' names were assembled into a table in core A, and the six words or so for another command name was too much.
Note carefully that I am not claiming the CTSS command was the *first* electronic mail command. At the time Noel and I were writing MAIL, we knew of an electronic mail project at BBN called, I think, MERCURY. And there was a military message system called AUTODIN, what are its dates? DTSS might have had some kind of inter-user mail by then.
We all owe a debt to Ray Tomlinson, for choosing the @ sign (Multics ARPANet mail first used the control argument -at instead, since the @ was a line kill character) and for extending the pre-existing computer mail paradigm to the ARPANet. But that wasn't the first mail message. Probably wasn't the first inter-computer mail message.
And, unfortunately, I have no recollection at all of the first message that Noel and I sent while testing CTSS mail.
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Tom Van Vleck <thvv@BEST.COM>
Subject: CM> Beginnings of E-mail
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Scott Crawford asks:
>When, where, to who and how was the FIRST e-mail sent? I am interested in knowing the history of e-mail and how it came to where it is today... so feel free to expand past the initial e-mail occurence!
As Dave Anderson notes, the MIT CTSS system had electronic mail in 1965. Noel Morris and I wrote it, implementing a suggestion by Louis Pouzin and Glenda Schroeder in a CTSS Porgramming Staff Note. They wanted mail so that operators could inform you when your lost file was retrieved. Noel and I saw it as far more, and we were right.
I visited MIT on business a few summers ago, and dropped in on Roger Roach, who still had the CTSS listings. We looked at the MAD code for the MAIL command, and it was clearly my code. MAIL was a privileged command, that could do things normal user programs could not: it used the ATTACH.(PROB, PROG) call to switch to the recipient's file directory and added the message to the file MAIL BOX. We can date the command fairly precisely, since the ATTACH call was introduced as part of the "new file system" for CTSS which came up on August 9, 1965. So MAIL was added after that.
You know how the UNIX mail command works two ways, reads mail if invoked without an address, and sends if invoked with an address? My fault. The UNIX interface derives from the Multics mail command (I wrote the first one) which derives from the CTSS command. And the CTSS command worked that way because I could only have one command -- privileged commands' names were assembled into a table in core A, and the six words or so for another command name was too much.
Note carefully that I am not claiming the CTSS command was the *first* electronic mail command. At the time Noel and I were writing MAIL, we knew of an electronic mail project at BBN called, I think, MERCURY. And there was a military message system called AUTODIN, what are its dates? DTSS might have had some kind of inter-user mail by then.
We all owe a debt to Ray Tomlinson, for choosing the @ sign (Multics ARPANet mail first used the control argument -at instead, since the @ was a line kill character) and for extending the pre-existing computer mail paradigm to the ARPANet. But that wasn't the first mail message. Probably wasn't the first inter-computer mail message.
And, unfortunately, I have no recollection at all of the first message that Noel and I sent while testing CTSS mail.
______________________________________________________________________
